and I bet the same could be said for full-time clerical workers in 2015. changes in software and workflow in the office can be glacial.

The majority of the posts here boil down to one simple fact:

The commercial - proprietary - mass market product or service is more appealing and accessible than anything the geek has to offer.

Android/IOS tablets do not count when measuring PC OS market share - they are not classified as "personal computers" and cannot be factored in to market share statics.

Actually some of the various agencies do count them. They also seem to have some level of substitution effect primarily decreasing usage and thus increasing length of the buying cycle. But we are have also seen something like 100m mostly stop using PCs, getting their needs met by tablets and phones.

But that just shrinks the overall market, it doesn't much change who dominates that market.

There are essentially 4 measures of dominance that are commonly used:

a) Unit market share
b) Sales share (dollar weighted market share)
c) profit share
d) controlling the direction of the industry

(a) Android /iOS substitution is a serious threat. A huge number of people who would otherwise want newer PCs don't.
(b) Is rapidly collapsing while and Microsoft may fall under Apple soon in the non-server market
(c) Apple (OSX) has been dominant here forever ranging from 85-91% of profit share for $1k plus laptops and now has around the same margins for all end user PC sales.
(d) I think its pretty clear Microsoft has lost this and is thrashing.

I don't see dominance.

For a car analogy, saying Android/IOS tablets sales are dethroning Windows is like stating a surge in bicycle sales is stealing market share from Ford pick-ups.

No it isn't. The average price on an iOS phone for example is approaching double the average price of a Windows PC and the unit volumes are getting close to equal. The analogy is more like Ford vs. Dodge pickups.

All statistics that you can find on various sites show that each of Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 individually hold more market share than all non-Windows OSes combined.

I don't know where you are getting that. Embedded Linux crushes Android and Android crushes Windows. iOS is getting close to Windows.

I can argue the Marlins are the dominant baseball team if I insist on only counting teams in Miami. But once I realize teams outside Miami play against the Miami team I have to deal with the complexity of the market. Windows right now is dominant in the niche of $250-700 keyboard based systems. Go either above or below price or drop the keyboard based and things look quite different.

You're unlikely to get the answer you seek because you've framed your question in terms of a movement Stallman is (rightly) opposed to, and in ways that he's already explained many times (even the /. summary points to one of the essays on this) -- why Stallman objects to the open source movement (older essay, newer essay also pointed to in the /. summary). He recommends against using Facebook (and has started every talk in the past year or so with an explanation of why posting pictures of people in Facebook/Instagram is a bad idea). I hope he will point out to you that you don't need these things to avoid "losing connection with the rest of the world" and you should value things the open source movement was designed to never talk about, and privacy these services are designed to deny every user of the web. One can hardly "benefit the users" while advocating against copyleft (as the open source movement does), never talking about software freedom (as the open source movement was designed to do), and maintaining a monstrous search engine (as is at the heart of Facebook). You could have done the slightest bit of research and found any of these things I pointed to.

I don't think that's true. Linux is a huge percentage of the x86 ecosystem. For example on Azure the cloud platform with far and away the most Microsoft depending on how you could Windows images are somewhere between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the total images. So even in Microsoft's own cloud they mostly sell Linux. An x86 standard that doesn't support Linux won't be an x86 standard. What it would be is a Microsoft hardware standard and that would at best fragment the x86 architecture. They remember how the Microsoft-Intel-Western Digital standard beat IBM's Microchannel, I suspect they don't want to make the same mistake.

So no I don't think its the laws.

Yes I think they would have. Enterprise users clearly use smart phones. They are heavy tablet consumers. They have lots of laptops. There is no reason that ubiquitous computing couldn't have been a superior model for them than buying lots of applications, data sharing, and worrying about compatibility as they undergo complex upgrade cycles for various devices:

Does version 6 of by web BI tool use the same data format as version 3.2 of my phone based BI tool, version 7.6 of my tablet based sales management tool and version 4.5 of my desktop tool? I want to upgrade my browser and that's going to force me to upgrade the web tool....

You can see how having one app across the board solves that. I think Steve Ballmer was absolutely right (heresy to say that on /. I know) in believing the alternative to ubiquitous computing wouldn't work for enterprise.

last line should read Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client because of how naive X11 is about toolkits.

Many of the ideas are taken from XMonad which is also used by people who like it and at the same time is also an excellent example of how monadic window management works. LISP is like that, everything in LISP is just a DSL so it is scriptable.

You are right before that Linux is becoming professional. It has been far too successful in too many areas to want to keep the hacker culture that existed 20 years ago. Of course the BSDs still have that. But you like hacker OSes go with something much more interesting than a UNIX. House / HaLVM (also Haskell) are pretty cool extensions for the modern world.

As far as tiling window managers for Wayland they already exist and I'd assume will get more sophisticated with time: There is Velox which is a varient of XMonad and Orbment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It seems like as things currently stand most of the pieces to do this exist. X does remote display. PulseAudio does network audio (though I am struggling to make that work). There is USB over TCP/IP support in Linux but you have to go to the commandline and tell a client to share a specific USB device

Wayland does Audio and Video now and can keep them unified. usb device redirection is part of the protocol so GTK/Qt should be implementing controllers that work within their respective desktops.

Anyway, implementing all of this.. if remote support is fragmented across toolkits, possibly non-existent on some lesser used toolkits.. that sounds even harder than it has ever been!

No it is far far easier. GTK, Qt, wxWindows, Mono... all understand that USB and sound exist so no hacking. For example Gnome -> Gnome can pass off intelligent information about streaming and buffering so remote sound is both good and responsive even if the lots of jitter on the network. USB of course requires device driver virtualization and the toolkits, already support that. Etc... This all becomes almost trivial.

Once you start trying to use Wayland the way it is meant to be used this becomes easy.

I think there would be a lot to gain if thin-clients were to become more mainstream.

They are mainstream its called remote desktop. That is in 2015 people using thing clients aren't remoting the video but remoting the desktop. The reason is that is doesn't cost much to add some CPU and video to the local machine and it makes it much more responsive. So the local system has a thin base OS. It loads toolkit information from a server when it isn't being used. When it is being used the server just passes it specifics about what's running. This is the model that can go on top of RDP which is what Wayland is implementing.

Wayland doesn't make thin client less practical but rather makes it vastly more practical because you'll be able to thin the client down to something like an Android device and thus have the base OS built in. Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client, because of how naive is about toolkits.

I suspect the big change we'll see trusted computing. Features like Samsung Knox but for PC. Microsoft was too chicken to go all the way and take all the heat when they were leading the effort along with Intel. This way Intel and Microsoft have just enabled it, there will need to be other 3rd party software but it will be the hardware OEMs that actually deploy it. Lots of pieces and no one but the security vendors doing more than enabling.

As far as the general fear of blocking other OSes, I doubt it. Microsoft has been generous, supportive and and cooperative with Linux vendors in terms of getting keys to work. Those vendors have been supportive with more open players.

How much does it rein supreme? The market has been falling in size in terms of units now for 6 years. At the same time another wave of APU falling is starting up. The upper end is firmly in the hands of Apple whose reach is expanding. The bottom end is being eaten by $75-150 Android tablets and by iPads. Mobile is decreasing usage as well. Losing ground rapidly above and below with the middle softening doesn't sound like reining supreme. That sounds like being rapidly displaced.

Your point is spot on. Apple wouldn't have cared and Linux would have done it both ways until people got used to the change. Microsoft's Windows 8 was supposed to be a transitional operating system with touch becoming an important and key part. All applications needed to have a reasonable touch mode. They ultimately have pulled back from touch which means they pulled back from ubiquitous computing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) Windows 8 was there last chance to prevent themselves from being a niche: the standard enterprise desktop product. Now that's still a huge niche but moving from the default everything to just one particular submarket is a big loss.

Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.

We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.

My .2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a .001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.

As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.

As for ROI... Remember where I started. 5 years to pay off the original investment (no profit) then Y years of profit. The goal of infrastructure is not to break even,. not to have an ROI of 0. Your $120 box is a perfect example. You are renting it at $5/mo which means a 24 mo breakeven point not 25 years. A 25 year payoff would be you renting the box for $.40 / mo, a 50 year payoff $.20/mo.

this sandwich very likely isn't as expensive as you think

Only because, like most armchair engineers, you've breezily handwaved away issues you have quite cleary no clue about.
 

Yet, for being the least reliable, it's a method that works very well - presuming the operator is properly trained.

No it doesn't. Not even in the slightest.

Millions (billions?) of man hours of operation of aircraft, spacecraft, submarines, etc... etc.. says just the opposite. Again, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.